


Lucid

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 1940s, Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Canon Compliant, M/M, WWII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-26
Updated: 2016-03-26
Packaged: 2018-08-11 04:08:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7875598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once they shackle him to a table in the doctor's lab - none of this is about the war, not really, all the POWs realize that the first week - Bucky starts dreaming, because it's easier in his head than in his body with the pain. (He's never quite sure, after that, whether or not he's awake.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lucid

**Author's Note:**

> cabloom, in her infinite wisdom, described this as, "Hallucination/clarity blurring here in that hyper real way lucid dreams have. Horrible."

Bucky is still fairly certain that he’s dreaming. Steve is in all of his dreams, though normally he’s coughing, red-faced from the lack of oxygen, splotches over his sickly pallor. Once he’d been dressed up like their grocer, a shaggy brown mustache and an apron over an unlikely potbelly, his Yiddish just as mangled as usual. So seeing him in Superman’s muscles, tearing manacles from a steel table isn’t the strangest dream Bucky’s had. At least in this one, Steve is speaking English.

He prefers the dreams. Whatever HYDRA – because they do not bother to keep their organization a secret, once Zola has him on the table, hovering over an experiment who screams from delirium and pain – wants from him, they are ruthless in their attempts to obtain it. He thinks, sometimes, in the haze of his mind, that they want Steve, and so holds the other man close even in his dreams.

The villains are after Steve again, in this new dream, and so Bucky runs with him, trying to escape the fire as the factory caves in. Probably Zola has given him more drugs. The drugs always feel like burning under his skin, flames licking at his face and scorching his bare feet.

This new, commanding illusion of Steve tells him to run, but Bucky, delirious, is sure that it’s another trick, a way for HYDRA to capture Steve as soon as Bucky’s gone. That if he lets go, even in his dreams, they will sink their needles into Steve and Bucky will never see him again.

Bucky will never leave Steve, whether he is a potbellied grocer or a superhero, an asthmatic artist or Brooklyn’s sorriest Jew, whether he is the flesh and blood that Bucky left behind, or the imaginary savior Bucky invents to escape HYDRA’s factory and the unending pain.

Steve is in all his dreams. Even after the fall. He knows what they want, but he will never let Steve go.


End file.
